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Words, words, words. At the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, I spent most of the day listening to words and phrases used by human rights activists to describe sexual violence in conflict – words that are being co-opted by government officials.

In the opening plenary of the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, I listened to speaker after speaker recount the pervasiveness of sexual violence in war and the toll it takes on survivors. It made me wonder: how many rapes does it take before we make the world a place where all people live free – free from the fear of sexual violence?

Government officials, activists, survivors, and members of the media are converging on the outskirts of London by the thousands to attend the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict this week.

Clyde Collins Snow, a pioneering forensic scientist who developed the field of investigation of individual and mass graves to gather evidence of human rights violations, died on May 16, 2014 at the age of 86. He mentored dozens of forensic scientists and consulted with Physicians for Human Rights on critical projects including exhumation of graves in Iraqi Kurdistan and in the former Yugoslavia.